Lotte: The Machneyuda Kitchen Learns to Speak Tiberian

The sardines arrive first, silver and briny, pulled from the Kinneret a few kilometres from where you are sitting, laid over a Turkish salad with torn sourdough and a preserved lemon aioli that cuts the oil like a squeeze of light. Beyond the glass the lake has gone the colour of hammered pewter, and the Golan cliffs on the far shore are losing their edges to dusk. Behind you the open kitchen throws up charcoal smoke and the green smell of zaatar. Somewhere in the room a cork leaves a bottle of Recanati. This is Lotte on a weekday evening in Tiberias, in a dining room that has been feeding travellers since 1946, doing the one thing the Machneyuda group had never attempted before these doors opened: cooking every service inside the laws of kashrut.

Before a single plate went on the menu, Chef Assaf Granit and his team did their homework. They walked into Tiberias, collected recipes from local women, traced the dishes that mattered to the city's Jewish, North African and Levantine layers, and worked out what a Galilean kitchen sounds like when it is allowed to speak for itself. Executive chef Eliad Danon, who trained under Granit and took this room as his first post as head chef, turned that research into a menu that reads like an argument for the north.